It has been a while since I posted, and while I’m probably the only person bothered by that, I thought I ought to put an update together!

The blog has been going for over 5 years now, and in that time, in the UK, the attitude towards open source software has changed completely. There are now a lot of people who “get” open source, and are quite vocal in combating the FUD which we still unfortunately see from time to time. I don’t see the point in posting if all I’m going to say is “I agree with that person over there” so I have refrained from posting unless I feel very strongly about something.

Then there’s wordpress. Quite frankly, I’m sick of it. I’m sick of fighting a losing battle against hackers, despite my best efforts. I find it hard to engage with my blog when I feel like I can’t really trust the software. So it’s time to move platforms- though finding the time to do that with minimum disruption is proving a little daunting!

Finally, and here’s the good news and the only really “geo” part of this post- I am about to kick off an upgrade of portable GIS. No, really! For a while I wondered if it was worth the bother as it has got so much easier to deploy all the packages on windows, with the awesome OSGeo4W, and the plethora of bootable USB options if all you want to do is try the packages out. However, portable GIS is still downloaded plenty of times a month, and I occasionally get plaintive emails asking for it to be updated. Not only that, but we’re organising some training courses on open source GIS and quite frankly portable GIS kicks *ss for that purpose. So, watch this space!

From the ancient to the modern. Here’s one of today’s great choral composers, Eric Whitacre, for your enjoyment. The choice of Biblical text for setting is interesting – I’m not sure I’ve ever heard another setting of this particular text.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was pretty excited when I received word that the University of North Dakota’s Scale-Up classroom is almost ready and accepting applications for classes in the Spring of 2013. The Scale-Up classroom is designed to foster an “active learning” environment in courses that have large “lecture sized” (100+) enrollments. The students are generally seated around smaller tables in groups of 8 to 10 – almost cafeteria style – and typically have access to computers. The design of the room makes it easier to implement collaborative activities and to promote an “flipped lecture” type environment where students teach one another and remain engaged in problem centered learning.

To this end, I’ve begun to propose a rather unconventional history course ideally suited for the Scale-Up environment:

The large survey class has changed radically over the last 20 years. The traditional arrangement of the class positions the faculty member as the “sage on the stage” and the students in the audience in order to maximize the number of students exposed to the content in a controlled environment. This organization has gradually given way to more dynamic and interactive arrangements between student and teacher. While the much-maligned jargon of “active learning” has lost favor in recent times, there is no doubt that a greater degree of interaction between faculty and students has become increasingly normalized within pedagogical literature and day-to-day teaching practices of faculty.  At the same time, enrollment pressures, efficiency expectations, and old habits have continued to support the presence of large lecture style classes particularly at the introductory level. Occasional efforts to flip or invert the lecture have met with the typical difficulties: large classes, lecture bowl style seating, and limited space for students to meet, work, share, or write.

In recent years, the rapid expansion of digital technologies has offered ways to overcome the physical limits of the classroom.  Discussion boards, integrated social networking components, and the use of new and multi media delivery systems have expanded the educational environment beyond the physical confines of lecture hall, distended the concept of learning communities, and challenged the tension between groups and individual learners.

Despite the expansion of the digital frontiers and a continuously renewed commitment to “active learning” and “flipped lectures”, traditional textbooks persist as the main way in which students encounter “content”. Traditional textbooks are generally linear, unappealing, and expensive obstacles that many faculty feel as compelled to work around as to justify to their students. Remarkably the history textbook of the 21st century is structurally similar to the textbook of the mid-20th century, even if the content has changed to suit new academic fashions and tastes.

My proposed use of the Scale-Up classroom is to create a History 101: Western Civilization course where the students write their own textbook. This takes its inspiration from recent discussions of inverting the lecture, conceptual literature projects that compose journals or edited books in a fixed span of time,  collaborative spirit behind projects like Wikipedia, and the socially disruptive “DIY” practices associated with the edu-punk movement.

The course itself will be based upon my experiences teaching with both flipped lecture style History 101 class and teaching a similar course online. My flipped lecture classroom met once a week at night and featured 6 break out style groups who would meet weekly prepare responses to discussion questions based on primary sources. In an online version of the class these discussion questions became part of an online discussion board where the students responded both to prepared questions and their fellow student’s posts. Both techniques created an environment where students learned from one another rather than from a set lecture. The groups were generally big enough that better students and responses drove out the worse, and better students tended to model the quality for those less clear on the expectations of the class. At the same time, I have experimented extensively with wikis that allow students to produce collaborative, synthetic collections of weekly notes. I have also gained experience with using Twitter in the class to create social networks for the students that allowed them to forge a sense of community and to communicate in a transparent and immediate way.

The main goal of the Scale-Up History 101 Course will be to produce a synthetic History 101 textbook. The class will break into 15, 10 person groups, each responsible for a 5000 word chapter in the textbook. Using online resources, collaborative digital and classroom work spaces, and a restructured history lecture which focuses on methods, key interpretative themes, and techniques for writing history, students will be asked to invert the traditional educational process where students go from learning history from a faculty member, a textbook, and other economically and politically repressive arrangement to producing a textbook in a space where the tools and material of history are available in a far more democratized way than traditional introductory history lectures.

The advantage of the Scale-up classroom is that it will foster an integrated, simultaneous, realtime physical and digital environment that will allow multiple individuals to develop resources collaboratively. Wiki style text interfaces (even if managed through an off-the-shelf product like Google Docs) allow multiple students to edit a single document simultaneously and allow the faculty to track total contributions to a document.

At the same time, students will also have access in a group format to various resources on the web ranging from Google Earth to content sources like Wikipedia, digital primary source texts, digital open access textbooks, and new and multimedia resources.

I have a ways to go yet on this proposal and because of tricky time commitments over the summer, it seems unlikely that I’ll be in the first cohort to use the Scale-Up classroom. It is still really exciting to be part of the process of re-imagining learning space on campus.

Artefacts from the Cirebon shipwreck, which were unsuccessfully put up for sale in 2010, is once again put up for sale. The haul is worth approximately USD $80 million.

Cirebon shipwreck treasures on sale in Jakarta in May 2010, AFP 20120306

Treasure from wreck off Indonesia to go on sale
AFP, 06 March 2012

Ancient treasure worth an estimated $80 million dollars which was found in a ship that sank off Indonesia 1,000 years ago is up for sale again, the head of the excavation team said Monday.

The “Cirebon treasure” was discovered in a wreck off the port of Cirebon on Indonesia’s Java island and contains about 250,000 precious objects, including crystal, pearls and gold.

“(The haul) is certainly the largest ever found in Southeast Asia in terms of both quality and quantity,” Luc Heymans, the Belgian director of Cosmix Underwater Research Ltd., the Dubai-based firm that excavated the find, told AFP in an email.

The treasure was recovered from the wreck of a merchant ship — nationality unknown — that dates back to about about 960 A.D and was first spotted by Indonesian fishermen 57 metres (187 feet) under the sea.

Full story here.

Via Joel Watts.

It might not take more than a challenge to a state law prohibiting gay marriage, from a member of the clergy in a denomination that allows gay marriage, saying that the state is prohibiting them from freely exercising their religion, to really bring this aspect of the matter to everyone’s attention – and perhaps get it resolved at the level of the supreme court.

I was struck when a friend on Facebook shared this video, which explains how the currently popular “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster was rediscovered in Barter Books, a bookstore that I used to love to visit when I lived in the Northeast of England.

Click here to view the embedded video.

An international project is gaining invaluable insights into the history of ancient Israel through the collection and analysis of inscriptions — pieces of common writing that include anything from a single word to a love poem, epitaph, declaration, or question about faith and everything in between that does not appear in a book or on a coin.

History is too often viewed through the records of kings and great religious and military leaders and much of what we know about the past derives from official sources written on behalf of these individuals, but this new record tells us about the marks left by ordinary people that make up the population of the past.

“

Ancient Greek graffito from Beth She'arim [Credit: American Friends of Tel Aviv University

The tweets of antiquity

There has never been a comprehensive and concerted effort to collect inscriptions in a multi-lingual/multi-period  publication. Previous collections have been limited to the viewpoints of single cultures, topics, or languages. This innovative series of volumes seeks to uncover the whole story of a site by incorporating inscriptions of every subject, length and language, publishing them side by side.  “In antiquity, the part of the world that is now modern Israel was multilingual, multicultural and highly literate”, says Prof. Price. When the volumes are complete, they will include a corpus of data that is likely to contain 13,000 items in over ten languages.

The project represents countless hours in museum storerooms, church basements, caves and archaeological sites and saw the researchers dedicated to transcribing  inscriptions straight from the physical objects on which they are written whenever possible, instead of using previous drawings, photos or reproductions. The team has already discovered a great amount of material that has never been published before.

A painted inscription above a burial space in Beit She'arim is written in Aramaic: "The one who is buried in this (place) is Shim on, the son of Yohanan - and on oath, whoever shall open upon him shall die of an unfortunate end."

Analyse, translate and publish

Researchers have had to  overcome the challenges of incomplete inscriptions, eroded stonework and sometimes poor use of grammar and spelling, which represent different levels in education and reading and writing capabilities — or simply the informal nature of the text. Scholars thousands of years in the future might face similar difficulties when trying to decipher the language of our own text messages or emails.

Most of these inscriptions, especially the thousands of epitaphs, are written by average people, their names not recorded in any other source. This makes them indispensable for social, cultural, and religious history, suggests Prof. Price. “They give us information about what people believed, the languages they spoke, relationships between families, their occupations — daily life,” he says. “We don’t have this from any other source.”

The first volume, edited by Prof. Price, Prof. Isaac and others focus on Jerusalem up to and through the first century C.E., has already been published. New volumes will be published regularly until the project comes to a close in 2017, resulting in approximately nine volumes.

Some examples of the graffiti are of the Greek name “Christo” found on limestone walls in the Judean hills, the Jewish family name “Sh-ph-n” (“rabbit”) found in a first century CE burial cave, and the name “Yonatan” in another burial cave. Many scrawls were found in the extended caves used by the Jewish population to hide from the Romans during the Jewish Revolts of 66 and 135 CE. some of which have still to be deciphered.  Another fascinating text that was found in a tomb says, “Take courage, Holy Parents of Pharcitae, udes adonitas — no one is immortal.”

Hebrew Graffito. Image: {link url="http://www.flickr.com/people/jaydoubleyougee/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"}Justin Garland{/link} (Flickr, used under a {link url="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"}CC BY-NC-SA 3.0{/link})

“I was here”

Graffiti, which comprise a significant amount of the collected inscriptions are a common phenomenon throughout the ancient world. Famously, the walls of the city of Pompeii were covered with graffiti, including advertisements, poetry, and lewd sketches. In ancient Israel, people also left behind small traces of their lives — although discussion of belief systems, personal appeals to God and hopes for the future are more prevalent than the sexual innuendo that adorns the walls of Pompeii.

“These are the only remains of real people. Thousands whose voices have disappeared into the oblivion of history,” notes Prof. Price. These writings are and have always been a way for people to perpetuate their memory and mark their existence.

Our world has its graffiti too from doorways and bathroom stalls to even protected archaeological sites. Although it may be considered annoying now, “in two thousand years, it’ll be interesting to scholars,” Prof. Price says with a smile.

Main Source: American Friends of Tel Aviv University press release

More information:

• Tel Aviv University’s Department of Classics
• Archaeologists Unscramble Ancient Graffiti In Israel by Jacki Lyden (NPR) – 2011
• American Friends of Tel Aviv University

Sociedades Precapitalistas es una publicación científico-académica, electrónica, cuyo objetivo es difundir estudios historiográficos focalizados en la génesis, morfología y dinámica de las estructuras sociales anteriores al capitalismo. Contempla investigaciones de la antigüedad oriental y grecolatina, la Europa medieval y moderna, la América precolombina y colonial, entre otras, privilegiando especialmente los enfoques comparativos. Asimismo, se favorece el debate historiográfico y la reflexión teórica.

La revista está editada por el Centro de Estudios de Historia Social Europea (CEHSE), unidad de investigación que integra el Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (IdICHS UNLP-CONICET) sito en la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata. 

Sociedades Precapitalistas propone continuar con los principios metodológicos que guiaron a los artículos publicados en el Boletín de Historia Social Europea (ISSN 1669-5763, ISSN 2250-446X para su versión en línea), editado por el CEHSE a finales de los años ochenta. De esta manera, recuperar el espíritu del Boletín se convierte en un homenaje a todos aquellos que estimularon los estudios sobre las sociedades preburguesas, generando un espacio en el ámbito académico abierto a quienes compartan el interés por el conocimiento de dichas sociedades.

Sociedades Precapitalistas ofrece su espacio para publicar artículos, reseñas y estudios bibliográficos, y transcripciones documentales. Sociedades Precapitalistas cuenta con dos ediciones anuales, que se publican en los meses de diciembre y junio, manteniendo las características de las publicaciones científicas y posibilitando su difusión nacional e internacional a través de la edición electrónica. Sus contenidos son de acceso abierto y se rigen bajo licencia Creative Commons.

Sociedades Precapitalistas está incluida en el Directorio Ulrich e indizada en Dialnet

Vol. 1, Number 1

Artículos

Reflexiones en torno a la génesis del camporeligioso y su pertinencia heurística en los albores de la sistematizaciónestatal en el Antiguo Egipto - Una relectura de la sociología de la religión enPierre Bourdieu.
Mariano Bonanno (Universidad Nacional de Rosario - UniversidadNacional de La Plata)

Lasreformas de Solón y los límites de la coacción extraeconómica en la Atenasarcaica.
Diego Paiaro (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Las múltiples dimensionesde un concreto: prácticas, actores, redes y contratos. Notas sobre el abordajedel crédito en los márgenes hispanoamericanos de Antiguo Régimen (Buenos Aires,siglo XVII).
Martín L. E. Wasserman (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Reseñas

Ruffini, Giovanni Roberto, Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Adrián Mariano Viale (Facultadde Filosofía y Letras – Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Briggs, Ch., Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth-Century England. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Octavio Colombo (Facultad de Filosofía y Letras – Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Fuentes

El Ordoad dandam poenitentiam del abad Regino de Prüm.
Analía Sapere (Universidad de Buenos Aires –CONICET) y Andrea Vanina Neyra (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Centro de Estudiose Investigaciones de las Culturas Antigua y Medieval - Universidad Nacional delSur)

La revue est éditée par la Faculté d’Histoire de l’Université Saint-Clément d’Ohrid de Sofia en Bulgarie. Elle est orientée principalement sur l’étude de l’ Europe médiévale et publiera études, commentaires et traductions de textes médiévaux. 

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	Брой 1		Специално издание Сборник в памет на Доц. д-р Георги Сотиров
	Брой 2
	Брой 3

Seen on the Classicists list:

CFP: International Workshop „Roman Sarcophagi“
October 10-13, 2012, Graz (Austria)

The Department of Archaeology & Numismatics of the Universalmnuseum Joanneum
and the Institute of Archaeology of the University of Graz will host a
conference on Roman sarcophagi in October 2012.

In addition to analytical and synthetic contributions the topics are
methodology, production and distribution in the Danube provinces, and the
integrative analysis of epigraphy and sarcophagi.

Please note that reports about new finds or the history of collections
will only be accepted for the poster session.

Abstracts of no more than 800 words on the above topics will be accepted
until March 31st 2012.

http://www.museum-joanneum.at/en/archaeologiemuseum/events_4/international-workshop-roman-sarcophagi

Contact

Dr. Barbara Porod

barbara.porod AT museum-joanneum.at
Fax +43-316/8017-9518
Universalmuseum Joanneum
Archäologie & Münzkabinett
Schloss Eggenberg
Eggenberger Allee 90, 8020 Graz, Austria

Seen on the Classicists list:

CALL FOR PAPERS

New Perspectives on locatio conductio in Roman law

6 – 8 June 2012, Edinburgh

In the nearly 100 years since the publication of Emilio Costa’s La locazione di cose nel diritto romano (1915), the first monograph of the twentieth-century on letting and hiring in Roman law, modern understanding of this contract has changed significantly. The reasons for this are mainly twofold. First, scholars of Roman law, while still largely engaged in purely dogmatic investigations of the origins and development of legal rules and of the contributions of individual Roman jurists to this process, are slowly becoming more aware of the contexts in which these rules operated and their
relation to Roman society such as, for example, in the work of Bruce Frier (Landlords and Tenants in Imperial Rome (1980)) and Dennis Kehoe (Investment, Profit and Tenancy: the Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy (1998)), to name but a few. In second place, the publication in 1999 of Roberto Fiori’s La definizione della ‘locatio conductio’ (1999) comprehensively transformed modern understanding of the conceptual structure of this contract and finally laid to rest the much debated issue of the “trichotomy”. The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars with an interest in locatio conductio in Roman law (whether in Roman private or
public law) to explore new insights (dogmatic, social, economic) into the origin and growth of this contract.

Deadline for submission of proposals: Friday 30 March 2012

For more information or to submit and abstract, please email Dr. Paul J. du Plessis (p.duplessis AT ed.ac.uk)

By: Mark Goodacre, Dept of Religion, Duke University

The current discussion of Talpiot Tomb B, the “patio tomb”, has largely centered on the interpretation of the picture on one of the ossuaries.  But Tabor’s and Jacobovici’s argument that this tomb is linked with Jesus and his disciples is related to their earlier claims about Talpiot Tomb A, the “garden tomb”.  The case that this is the Jesus family tomb was made in 2007 in a book, a film and a website.[i]  It was largely based on a claim about statistics — this cluster of names, bearing so close a relationship to the names of members of Jesus’ family, was most unlikely to have occurred by accident.

At the time, I and many others were sceptical of the claim. It appeared to rely on a dubious identification between the name “Mariamēnē” and Mary Magdalene, who was identified as Jesus’ wife, and it failed to take seriously the non-matches in the tomb, especially “Judas son of Jesus”.

In a bid to explain the difficulties, I turned to an analogy that Jacobovici liked to use, an analogy based on the Beatles.[ii]  It worked by saying that if in two thousand years a tomb was discovered in Liverpool that featured the names John, Paul and George, we would not immediately conclude that we had found the tomb of the Beatles. But if we also found so distinctive a name as Ringo, then we would indeed be interested. Jacobovici claimed that the “Ringo” in this tomb is Mariamēnē, whom he interpreted as Mary Magdalene and as Jesus’s wife.

I thought the analogy to be without merit and wrote:

What we actually have is the equivalent of a tomb with the names John, Paul, George, Martin, Alan and Ziggy. We might well say, “Perhaps the ‘Martin’ is George Martin, and so this is a match!” or “Perhaps John Lennon had a son called Ziggy we have not previously heard about” but this would be special pleading and we would rightly reject such claims. A cluster of names is only impressive when it is a cluster that is uncontaminated by non-matches and contradictory evidence.[iii]

My concern was the same then as it is now, that you cannot cherry pick the data that you use in your statistical analysis.  The difficulty is clear when one pays attention to the comments made about “Judas son of Jesus”:

The most controversial ossuary pulled from the Tomb of the Ten Ossuaries was undoubtedly the one inscribed “Judah, son of Jesus,” the ossuary of a child. If indeed the tomb uncovered in East Talpiot in 1980 is that of Jesus and his family, and if indeed Jesus of Nazareth had a son, this ossuary contradicts dramatically nearly 2000 years of Christian tradition.[iv]

The difficulty ought to be apparent.  The whole case is based on the idea of an extraordinary correlation between the names in the tomb, but here there is an admission that in fact one of the ossuaries “contradicts dramatically nearly 2000 years of Christian tradition”.  In a case that requires extraordinary correlation, extraordinary contradiction simply will not do.

In their new book The Jesus Discovery,[v] Jacobovici and Tabor return to the question of the name-correlations and again attempt to apply the analogy from the Beatles, though now with some modification.  Here they add that John is the son of an Alfred, and we find out that this is indeed John’s father’s name.  They go on:

Then a fourth grave turns up with the name Ringo. Finally, not two hundred feet away we find a burial monument dedicated to the memory of the Beatles and all they contributed to pop music in their long career together. We believe that this is essentially what we have in the case of our two Talpiot tombs. We in fact have our “Ringo” in the Jesus tomb, as we will see — and what’s more, we believe that we have a “Yoko” as well — and the Patio tomb now provides us with a new context in which we can better understand the resurrection faith of Jesus’ first followers.

The difficulty with this modified version of the analogy is not only the lack of a Ringo or a Yoko in the Talpiot tomb A,[vi] but also the suggestion that the circumstantial evidence provided by Talpiot tomb B amounts to something like “a burial monument dedicated to the memory of the Beatles and all they contributed”.  However one interprets the markings in Talpiot tomb B, there is no explicit link there to Jesus, his followers or early Christianity.

The Beatles analogy helps us to reflect on the nature of the case for the association of the Talpiot tombs with Jesus’ family and disciples.  If a filmmaker were to find a tomb in Liverpool in two thousand years’ time featuring names like John, Paul and George, he would not have found the Beatles.  John died in New York in 1980, he was cremated and no one knows for certain where his ashes are.  Some speculate that Yoko Ono still has them.  They are certainly not in Liverpool.  George died in Los Angeles in 2001, he was cremated and no one knows for certain where his ashes are.  Some say that they were scattered on the River Ganges.  They are certainly not in Liverpool.

The filmmaker of the future might imagine that the right way to find the historical Beatles would be to look for tombs in Liverpool, but he would be wrong. He might imagine that John, Paul, George and Ringo all lived together in the same street, as they did in the film Help!  He might speculate that they all died and were buried together too, along with members of their family.   It would all make for an enjoyable fiction, no doubt, and some might find it reassuring, but it would tell the scholars of the future very little about the historical Beatles.  The study of ancient history is more often about coming to terms with the missing pieces than it is about drawing lines between unrelated phenomena.

The New York Times‘ eyewitness reporter Rachel Donadio inaccurately described,

Feb. 12, a wild night when marauding bands of arsonists with Molotov cocktails targeted shops and buildings, most of them historic….

As more than 6,000 policemen stood guard, these roving bands – several dozen criminals, by official estimates – infiltrated a vast, largely peaceful demonstration of more than 80,000 people and pushed the city into mayhem.

The New York Times' Rachel Donadio said that 'most' buildings destroyed in Athens on 12th February 2012 were 'historic'.

I corrected Rachel Donadio via Twitter on 26th February, Donadio and the New York Times via Twitter on 1st March, and the NYT via e-mail on 2nd March; but they neither replied to me nor corrected the article. I do not support the burning of any historic buildings; but it is a matter of fact. Most of the burned buildings were not historic; fewer than five per centwere.

#12fgr #Greece @RachelDonadio in Failing State article you say 'most' burned buildings were historic – that is not true nyti.ms/wU5W8R—
Sam Hardy (@samarkeolog) February 26, 2012

.@nytimes please correct @RachelDonadio story that says 'most' buildings burned in Athens were historic nyti.ms/wU5W8R #12fgr #Greece—
Sam Hardy (@samarkeolog) March 01, 2012

I pointed out that when the New York Times said 'most', it meant 'five per cent'.